Resource:How to organize student consulting teams that help underprivileged startups
How to organize student consulting teams that help underprivileged startups & action (in-progress)
Who is Grant Jacoby
Graduate of University Pittsburg, working in silicon valley. Head of Enactus, where he worked on bringing entrepreneurship and innovation to the University. Besides this, doing social media campaigns.
Nice event to bring ideas to the table: Mini-pitch competitions, with some reward (Free food always works!), and small time investment of students. A bit of logistics for this, you will need judges. Let the crowd form teams (4 or 5 members), if there are people with no team, just make teams for them.
The organization provides consulting to local business in social entrepreneurship.
Important to define the audience and geographic limitation. It is important to draw very specific goals and measurable outcomes.
- Intro (short paragraph describing the project developed)
- Need and goal (Why?)
- Hands on opportunity for students to engage in their community
- Greater learning experience - students become more well rounded
- More leadership experience
- More attractive as a job candidate - have real experience
- Networking opportunity
- What is the Outcome?
- Audience
- Students - undergrad and graduate
- All backgrounds who are interested in consulting - design, business, and engineering primarily
- All ages - variety of skillsets
- When starting the group, target freshman + sophomores
- Support (what types of support were necessary — faculty, student, leadership, alumni, community, etc)
Strategy to contact faculty, administrative staff, deans: prepare a very professional project (including the mission, goal, value proposition, how the project will impact positively the university community, the people involved, the funds requested and a detailed report on how the money is going to be spent).
The connection with ENACTUS (or other external network / consulting association) is a great way to get funding and support / successful model. Being a consulting branch of a bigger association might be a good strategy.
Find external partners for support among alumni who can connect you with organization and community, sponsor an event. At the same time, these organization may recruit the best students / students interested in entrepreneurship
Find opportunities - contact local business and entrepreneurs offering support and consulting from students
- Strategies
Key strategies to form and market the organization:
- Find a core group of students who care about entrepreneurship
- Network with faculty members to provide support throughout the process, eventually they will help connecting to the dean (and get financial support).
- Marketing campaign in campus should include flyers (good visual + convey basic information + good time of physical presence in different places in campus and connecting with diverse students + website + posters + facebook
- Mini-pitch competitions as a way to pool people together (consulting mini competitions around a social subject/problem in the community) , then present the consulting association
- Cost (what funding was necessary for the project, and how that funding was found/raised)
Cost and funding: they had a top-down funding support, the university contacted them to help solve specific problem in the community. It was something around $ 20 K a year, but we could run a similar project with $ 5-10K - that you will request by presenting the number of people will be impacted and how.
- Leadership (How do you decide who to choose?)
- Find individuals interested in the same thing as you are.
- Shared goal; in this instance the shared goal was to help the community through consulting efforts. The individuals united to push this initiative.
- Connections (connection with organizations, the university, and the community) - Ben
- Top down support is ideal from university, easier to be funded, ideally dean
- Get as many people involved as possible, draw from a diverse student population, more ideas are generated from different perspectives
- Reach out to alumni who are involved in startups
- Connect with corporations that are looking to hire entrepreneurial students
- Space (?)
- Activities
- The activities supported by the consulting organization promoted innovation and creativity. The consulting organization sup
- Pitch Competitions, Social Change, meetups with local entrepreneurs to consult them.
- Launch / Promotion (how the space is promoted to other students)
For setting up student consulting teams it is important to promote the events where you get your target audience together. Using traditional flyers where you announce the event, location, time, and a reward (can be simple 10-20$ gifts or free food), and handing them out usually gets people to turn up. Besides this, you can create social media accounts where you can promote your events to students and stakeholders. An important rule is to not be afraid to talk and send emails to random people, try to pitch your events and projects as much as possible, they might say no and not be interested, but that is fine. You only need one yes! Also try to use your network, try to get as many people involved as possible. Post your events in old chats, facebook group or anything else, they might just show up to your events.
- Lessons learned and tips for others (what worked and what didn’t, and your recommendations for others)
- Cast a wide net to reach out to as many students as possible (usually with free food and prizes!)
- Promote organization as much as possible (flyer, tabling)
- Focus on one central problem within local area
- Talk to as many organizations, “no” is okay, “yes” opens the door to many opportunities
- Find an organization on campus that can be your vessel for consultation groups
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